Walk by Faith
by scripting life
Summary: Because people seem to have forgotten, or are unaware of, Penny Johnson Jerald's description of 5.05 "Probable Cause" as a Stand-By-Your-Man episode.


_Spoilers: _Based on promo and episode stills for 5.05 "Probable Cause." Also mentions events from 5.04 "Murder He Wrote."

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Disclaimer: One of these days I'll remember to check and see if writing disclaimers are a part of ffn's policy, or if it's something that was started a long time ago, and everyone just kind of followed suit. Like sheep. But for now, I'll play my role as a part of that flock and say that _Castle _and all affiliated people, places, and things are the brainchild of Andrew Marlowe and Co. and ABC Studios. As such, I make no monetary profit from this work of fiction about fiction.

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_**Walk by Faith**_

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As Beckett studied the gaunt reflection staring back at her from the precinct's bathroom mirror, she wondered if she'd gone insane.

She was about to commit professional suicide, and she couldn't even bring herself to care.

The water she'd splashed on her face to wake herself from this living nightmare did nothing to slow the riot of tangled emotions from pressing down on her chest and making it hard to breathe. She watched in fascination as a stray droplet rolled down her jawline and plopped into the sink in a slow, graceful dive as it splattered to its untimely death.

Three days.

How could everything go so wrong in just three days?

Her mind flashed back to three mornings ago, that beautiful, blissfully ignorant morning when she'd woken up all wrapped up in him and had been so unbearably _happy_.

And then just weeks before that, they'd spent an incredible weekend away—interrupted by murder as it was—and they'd come out of that stronger than ever for all her irrepressible niggles of concern about the other women he'd brought to that house.

When he'd looked at her with such grave eyes and told her that "none of them were _you_," she'd been in such a state of overwhelmed emotions because this man—this wonderful man who reminded her how to laugh and to savor life—he wanted _her_.

And then together they'd made that house thoroughly theirs and she'd be lying if she said that she hadn't been secretly thrilled at the ease of their domesticity. It had been a glimpse, however short it may have been, of what life could be like for them—what it _would _be like because she'd known from the start (and even before they became an _us_) that he was It for her.

But now…now those days of joy and laughter were nothing but a cruel dream, a glimpse of a happiness that seemed forever beyond her grasp. The universe, it seemed, was never satisfied with her contentment.

But no. That's selfish. This wasn't about her.

This was about Castle, about a brutal murder allegedly done by his own hand. It's about the evidence that piled up against him by the hour. It's about the jewelry he bought for another woman and the alibi he couldn't—or wouldn't—provide.

It's about the agony in his eyes when he realized that she would believe—even for a fraction of a second—that he was capable of betraying her in all the worst ways.

Her fist lashed out to punch the face in the mirror.

The glass cracked, shards of wicked edges breaking skin and digging into flesh. The pain was a distant ache, blood leaking from her knuckles as her body heaved with broken sobs.

She hadn't let herself break down before this. Couldn't allow herself that luxury.

But in the privacy of this small, precinct bathroom, she broke.

She'd been the one to slap the handcuffs on Castle. Both Ryan and Esposito had each separately offered to do it in her stead, but she hadn't let them. This was her burden to bear, not theirs. She couldn't do anything to spare Castle the indignity of an arrest, but she wasn't about to let her boys suffer under the weight of arresting one of their own.

She'd had to remain cold and implacable because anything less than pure professionalism would have gotten her kicked off this case faster than she could utter a sound of protest. Then Castle's innocence would have been in the hands of another detective, one who knew nothing about him as a man and would not hesitate to throw him to the wolves.

But the look in eyes, watering and broken as he'd asked for his lawyer to protect himself from _her_…

She couldn't escape its condemnation.

And she deserved that condemnation because she knew that if their roles were reversed, he wouldn't have doubted her for a second. He never would have abandoned her as she had him.

She hated herself for being unable to trust so fully as he did.

She hated herself for even asking the question.

Was he capable of murder?

Under certain circumstances, she thought so, yes. He would kill for those he loved. That, she'd never doubted.

But was he capable of _this_ murder?

No. Not with this cruelty, and not with this kind of selfish motive.

For all her insecurities, she knew in the depths of her suspicious heart that he wouldn't cheat on her. That wasn't the type of man he was.

He'd told her once that the trick to making a story believable was in the details. Yes, the details of the evidence all added up to him as the killer.

But none of the details about him as a person matched what she knew about Richard Castle.

Her choice, then, was simple.

She could believe the story that the overwhelming evidence before her told. She could believe in the tools of her trade, in the forensics and the surveillance videos and the means-opportunity-motive trifecta. She could believe that this man with his morbid curiosity and macabre glee finally snapped and blurred, in the sickest way possible, the lines between fiction and reality.

She could believe that she never really knew him.

_Or_.

Or she could put her faith in the man that she'd come to know. To love. To _trust_. She could put her faith in him not because she's blinded by her emotions, but because she had repeated evidence of his faithfulness to her, of his character. She could put her faith in Richard Castle because she knew him like no one else.

When it came down to it, there was no choice.

She'd told him once that she'd get him out of jail.

It was time that she proved it.

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_"for we walk by faith, not by sight"_

_- 2 Corinthians 5:7_

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_A/N: While many of the speculation fics for "Probable Cause" (that I've read, at least) have focused on the betrayal of Beckett believing for even a second that Castle could be guilty and/or cheated on her, I wanted to go this direction because of Penny Johnson Jerald's tweet, in which she describes the episode using the four words "stand by your man," and also because of some of the episode stills that came out several weeks ago showing ***spoiler*** Castle and Beckett both banged up and bleeding and Castle holding a gun after what seems like a confrontation in a car. That scene looks like it comes AFTER Castle being arrested in the promo, so Castle must have been freed somehow. This is my version of how that happened.***end spoiler***_

_I haven't decided whether to leave this as a oneshot or to try to add to it, but for now, this is marked as complete. Let me know what you thought! Thanks!_


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